Gov. Ron DeSantis has restarted controversial migrant flights to other states, according to California’s attorney general, but this time that state’s rival governor is threatening to slap Florida officials with kidnapping charges for doing it.
“Ron DeSantis, you small, pathetic man,” Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote in a tweet Monday, which included a link to the California statute on abduction by force or fraud. “This isn’t Martha’s Vineyard,” he added, comparing it with the September incident.
The flights are resuming just as DeSantis begins his campaign for the White House, which former GOP U.S. Rep. David Jolly of Florida, now an MSNBC news analyst, said was no coincidence.
The Republican governor “has shown us that he’s willing to take official actions from the governor’s office that ultimately are done to support his presidential ambitions,” said Jolly, a co-founder of the Forward Party. “And the migrant flights are a perfect example.”
Eight months after previous Florida-funded flights of 48 mostly Venezuelan migrants from San Antonio, Texas, to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts made national headlines, a similar flight sent 16 Venezuelan and Colombian migrants from New Mexico to Sacramento, California, on Friday.
On Monday, a second flight from New Mexico with about 20 Venezuelan migrants landed in Sacramento, the New York Times reported.
For the first flight, the migrants were approached in Texas, this time in El Paso, by people offering jobs. They were flown out of nearby New Mexico and dropped off in Sacramento outside a Catholic church, while those arriving on the Monday flight were taken to meet with Newsom at the airport, according to the Times.
Eddie Carmona of PICO California, a faith-based group helping the migrants, told the Associated Press the first group did not know they were being taken to Sacramento and arrived with few belongings.
Carmona said U.S. immigration officials had already processed the…
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